Al Bello/GettyA 2006 file photo of boxer Arturo Gatti at the World Boxing and Fitness Center in Jersey City.

Arturo Gatti was a good kid who grew into a mostly good guy. But his sport has a dark side, and with it comes an almost self-fulfilling prophecy of self-destruction. Now Gatti has joined a hall of fame list of fighters who died violently.

Rocky Marciano, avoidable small plane crash. Sonny Liston, suspicious drug overdose. Trevor Berbick, hacked to death with machetes. Salvador Sanchez, crazy-speed sports car crash. Same for Carlos Monzon. Diego Corrales, motorcycle crash, just last year. Alexis Arguello, suicide, just last week. Now Gatti. There are many more, and many more to come.

The list of those who end up ill or feeble or impaired, or prematurely dead for health reasons is longer. Start with Muhammad Ali. Even longer is the list of those who end up in jail, or addicted to drugs, or broke and back on the streets where they first found the sport of temporary salvation. Mike Tyson, to name one.

Horse racing is the Sport of Kings, baseball is America's Pastime, soccer is the Beautiful Game. Boxing is called the Sweet Science, but it is not. It is the sport of Greek Tragedy. What makes a fighter great, ultimately does him in. The anger. The violence. The macho veneer of indestructibility. The deep-seeded self-loathing it takes to stand there and get one's head pounded fuzzy, the superhuman will it takes to withstand that punishment and come back to win.

The sport can give a man an outlet for all that, and at the top end, even provide a decent living. But it is temporary.

Where does all that misanthropic energy go, when the cheering stops and the paydays dry up? The anger, and fast-lane turmoil, stays. Money gets burned, machines crashed. Lives go in the tank. Domestic violence and boxers is an old story, and eventually this will play out in the Gatti case. It will become a defense, whether it's true or not.

Arturo Gatti was a good kid, the son of Canadian immigrants from Italy. His father was an electrician who sent his kids to Catholic schools. The middle-class work ethic fed all Gatti's success and much of his popularity. He won because he was the hardest worker. The fans loved him because he gave blood in the ring, and flesh outside it. There wasn't a hand he didn't shake, a hug he didn't give, an autograph he didn't sign.

But you wonder how being loved for taking a beating changes a man. You wonder what kind of hardness comes with being loved more for beating someone worse.

Yes, boxing attracts a certain type. But it molds others into certain types. Some of the fighters mentioned above were not born hard-cases. Sanchez, perhaps the greatest featherweight ever, was the son of successful Mexican doctor. He was doing triple digits in his Porsche in the hours before dawn when he ran into the back of a fruit truck.

Some found second careers. Longtime middleweight champ Monzon, the national hero of Argentina, became an action-film movie star. But he was a wife-beater. His second wife, an actress, ended up at the bottom of a balcony after a fight, and Monzon went to jail. He crashed at high-speed during a weekend furlough. Some say on purpose.

Arguello, one of boxing's gentlemen, admitted to being a cocaine addict, but was later elected mayor of Managua, Nicaragua's largest city. He shot himself in his home.

Andrew Mills/The Star-LedgerGatti jumps rope at the World Boxing & Fitness Center in Jersey City while preparing to defend his WBC Super Lightweight Championship belt against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Atlantic City in 2005.

You wonder what boxing does to a man's soul. It is glorious, but inhumane. The rises are meteoric, the falls catastrophic.

None of this is to say Arturo Gatti was a bad guy. He was a good guy. But there was heavy drinking, by his own admission, and some bad choices, by his own admission.

All of that -- until Saturday at least -- was easy to overlook because Arturo Gatti also had a sincerity about him -- maybe even a sensitivity -- that emerged from behind the mask of scar tissue and misshapen features earned in all those boxing wars.

After he lost to Mayweather in what was the biggest fight of his life, Gatti was asked to help launch a fledgling anti-gun-violence public service campaign. The idea was to get a bunch of tough guys from all walks of sports to convince kids that "Guns are for Punks." The idea died at the doorstep of teams and leagues, never getting so much as a second look. But Donald Trembley, the former PR man of Main Events, Gatti's promoter, signed up the former champ. Gladly.

"He really wants to do it," Trembley said.

And so Gatti came to the gym, still bruised from the Mayweather fight, looked into a video camera with his fists up, and said, "This is Arturo Gatti and I got a question for you: If you're so tough, why do you need a gun?"

He had a loving family, but his marriage went violently bad. He leaves a 1-year-old boy, the son he always wanted. The son, perhaps, he married for.

All those good intentions, gone in the chaos and contradictions of a boxing life.